In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  “Willy, you’re going to have to explain all this stuff about killing people. What makes you think he killed your husband? Why would he want to kill you?”

  “God, there’s so much you don’t know.” Willy told him about the storm, and the tree limb crashing through the office window. “When I went inside there, I sort of started to clean things up, and I saw all these photographs lying on the floor. Right next to them was this upside-down ornamental wooden box, like a fancy cigar box, that must have been knocked off a shelf. All those photographs were of dead people, and one of them was Jim. They cut his hands off! He was shot to death, and he was lying next to the car they found him in.”

  “Do you still have that picture?”

  “Are you crazy? He was dead! Please help me figure out what to do. I’m shaking all over, like I have a fever. I don’t seem to be able to stop. Giles knows I saw the picture, and Mitchell is going to be coming for me as soon as he gets off the plane.”

  He asked for her room number.

  “Room 1427.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “I can sort of tell you what I did.” Willy lay on her king-sized bed, her arms folded in front of her. Tom Hartland’s sweet, serious face stared at her from a nubbly upholstered chair across from the desk.

  Tom had been at Haverford when Willy Bryce and Molly Witherspoon were students at Bryn Mawr, and not long after meeting at a mixer the three of them had become close friends. In the summer after their junior year, they had traveled through France in a heady bubble of van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Loire châteaux, Rimbaud and the Tel quel poets, Gauloise smoke, intense conversation, sleepness nights, bistro meals, le fromage du pays, and vin du pays. One night after too much vin rouge they had all piled into a big bed on the third floor of a cheap hotel in Blois, but nothing much had happened except for fumbling and laughter and Willy’s silent observation that Tom Hartland’s kisses tasted of honey and salt. Tom and Willy had been reading each other’s work for years, and they had their first acceptances—he with Scholastic, she with Little, Brown—within the same two-month period.

  Now, leaning forward in the ugly hotel chair with his elbows on his knees and his fingers steepled before him, he resembled the grown-up version of Teddy Barton, his brave and clever boy detective, steadfast, concerned, ready to be of use.

  “For example,” Willy said, “I know I spent the rest of the night in my office with the door locked. For a while I couldn’t really think. I just paced around the room, scared out of my mind, trying to work out some kind of plan. On their way out the Santolinis yelled through the door that they had to come back the next day. All I really wanted to do was get in my car and run away, but I only had about thirty dollars on me. I needed more cash, because I thought I’d have to be wary about using ATM machines.”

  “Good thinking,” Tom said. “If you’re going to run away, never use cash machines and throw away your cell phone. But flight isn’t a solution, it’s a delaying action.”

  “You said the Baltic Group was the definition of evil!”

  “They line their pockets in corrupt ways; they’re not a cabal of serial killers.”

  “You didn’t see those pictures.”

  “There could be a lot of explanations for them, Willy.” She turned her head on the pillows to give him a dark look. Tom said, “Of course, one of the explanations would be that he is a sick, homicidal fuck.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “Another one would be that he was involved in internal investigations of those incidents.”

  “ ‘Incidents’? They were murders, Tom.”

  “All the more reason for Baltic to cover itself.” This time the look in Willy’s eye was of a gloomy intensity. He said, “One thing I can do for you is to play devil’s advocate here. But as you must know, basically I’ll do anything you want. However, I do have something to say to you, and you’re going to have to listen to me.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

  “It’s important?”

  “Yes. It is to me.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “When you’re through with your story, Willy.”

  “Okay, but you’re a jerk. All right. I told you I spent the night in my office, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Have you ever tried to fall asleep when you’re scared out of your mind? Besides that, I realized that I’d trapped myself in that office, so stupid stupid stupid. I could have run out as soon as I saw the pictures, but after that, Giles would know I’d probably seen them, know what I mean? And he wouldn’t dream of letting me leave the estate until Mitchell got home. So I had to get out early in the morning, when those two creeps might not be waiting for me. Anyhow, at least I had plenty of time to think.

  “Mitchell and I had our own checkbooks, naturally, but he had just had me transfer most of my accounts to the little bank in Hendersonia, and I had no idea what kind of cash I had available. What I wanted to do was clean him out, if I could, and take his money with me. I didn’t think I really could do that, but anyhow. It was worth a try, wasn’t it?”

  “What did you do?” Tom asked.

  “I managed to get out, for one thing. I had a little suitcase with some clothes in it, and this white leather bag, like a duffel bag, that Mitchell gave me once, that I was going to use for the money. It was like five-thirty in the morning. I went downstairs without seeing a soul. Then I got in my car and took off for Hendersonia. They weren’t following me; they weren’t even up yet. I drove into the Pathmark parking lot and fell asleep, out of sheer exhaustion. Just before the bank opened, I called and asked for Mr. Bender, the president. I told him my husband was out of town and I needed a lot of cash in a hurry, so what could he do for me? You have to understand, all this time I am barely keeping myself under control.”

  “You were beginning to feel how angry you were.”

  “And scared! I was just improvising, I don’t really know what I wanted to do.” She scooted backward on the bed and sat up with her back against the headboard. “So this Bender guy tells me that he’s been thinking of arranging a meeting between us for some time, and he’d like me to come in that morning.”

  Willy gave Tom a look he could feel at the base of his spine.

  “And the next thing I know, I’m there, in his office. Remember when I said that I knew I locked myself in my office? Well, that’s why I said it.”

  “I don’t quite get you.”

  “Tom, it’s just like yesterday. Don’t you remember anything? I lost two and a half hours between the Met and the St. Regis! And afterward, the whole trip back to New Jersey disappeared. I’m getting in the car, boom, I’m standing on our lawn in Hendersonia. There’s no transition—East Fifty-fifth Street, Guilderland Road, one right after the other.”

  Tom’s gaze deepened.

  “Weird, huh? As if I needed any more weird shit in my life. So the same thing happens all over again, and I’m not in my car anymore, I’m in Mr. Bender’s office, and evidently I just got there, because he’s waving me toward a chair and telling me he’s glad I could come in on such short notice.”

  “It’s your selective amnesia.”

  “It’s more like the in-between stuff never happened. Like it was just left out. Anyhow, here’s this portly guy with glasses and a bald head, and it strikes me that he looks a little nervous. Right away, I know—Mitchell makes him nervous. And the first thing he says to me is that he’s very happy I brought Mitch Faber back to his hometown.”

  For it turned out that Mitchell Faber had been born and raised in Hendersonia. He had been on the local high school’s football team, and after graduation he’d gone to Seton Hall, but college had not worked out all that well, and in his second year he had enlisted in the army and qualified for Special Forces. His father, Henderson Faber, one of the Hendersons and a very, very important man in not only the town but that whole section of New Jersey, was happy to see
him launched in a career in the military. Because Mitch had always been a bit wild. If truth be told, his father’s influence was the reason some of the boy’s escapades never went any farther than they did. Military service channeled his aggression and made a man of him.

  What did the father do? Oh, he owned an auto-repair shop, but that didn’t cover half of it. Mr. Faber was a powerful man. He had a hand in almost every business in the county. In fact, Mr. Faber had been instrumental in founding the Continental Trust of New Jersey, the very bank they were in at that moment. Unfortunately, Mitch’s dad had died of a gunshot wound six, seven years back. Unknown assailant.

  “His father was murdered?” Tom said. “Was he some kind of gangster?”

  “Hang on,” Willy said. “We’re still getting to the good stuff.”

  The bank was very grateful for all the business Mr. Faber and Ms. Patrick had brought to it, Mr. Bender said. Of course, with the gentleman’s connections to the institution a great degree of trust came into play, mutual trust he hoped he could say, and excellent customers such as Ms. Patrick, soon to be wed to the son of a sort of “silent partner” at the inception of that institution, could be granted a degree of latitude not permitted the general public. With that said, and Mr. Bender wished most heartily that his concerns should not be taken amiss, it would be less than perfectly responsible if the chief officer of a banking institution did not seek independent verification of financial arrangements said to be established between account-holding couples. For example. Let us say a significant sum of money has been transferred between accounts, and agreements exist to establish similar transfers of funds at regular intervals, said agreement to have been signed right on Mr. Bender’s desk here by one of the parties, then taken away by that party for the secondary signature to be affixed at a separate location. In such a case, Mr. Bender trusted that the question of verification would be seen as a simple formality entered into for the purpose of dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s.

  And with that verbal flourish, the nervous Mr. Bender withdrew from a file on his desk an agreement that transferred an immediate $200,000 from various of Willy’s shiny new accounts into Mitchell’s savings account, and thereafter moved half that amount from hers to his on the first of each month for the next eight months. This document bore two signatures, Mitchell’s and one that came pretty close to Willy’s hasty scribble.

  “I don’t believe it,” Tom said.

  “He forged my signature on a document that moved one million dollars from my accounts into his over the next eight months.”

  “I mean, I do believe it, but it’s incredible. How did he explain it to the banker?”

  “He told him that I was nervous about investing money, and wanted him to do it for me. He said after we were married, we were going to have joint accounts anyhow.”

  “Were you?”

  “Do you think Mitchell ever discussed finances with me? It was taken for granted that he had tons of money. He certainly acted like a rich man—he bought me a Mercedes! With my money, it looks like. I guess I bought his Mercedes, too.”

  “Willy, how much money do you have in that crappy little bank, anyhow?”

  “Around three million,” she said. “Most of it was from Jim’s estate. If Baltic paid that kind of money to Jim, I thought Mitchell would earn pretty much the same thing.”

  “Mitchell must be a long way down the totem pole. What did the banker do when you told him your signature was forged?”

  “I thought he was going to commit hari-kari. You know the funny thing? He always knew there was something fishy about that agreement. He was afraid of Mitchell. Mitchell intimidated him. I bet Mitchell intimidated everyone in Hendersonia. And the arrangement didn’t take any money away from his bank, it just moved it around a little, so he didn’t ask any questions. He apologized for about half an hour and begged me to let him make things right.”

  Tom laughed. “He’s been ‘making things right’ all afternoon. I bet his shredder’s seen a lot of use.”

  Willy drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. To Tom, in the low light of the bedside lamp, she looked, at first, only a few years older than the mysterious girl he had met in 1985; then he saw the fine lines around her mouth and the faint tracery under her eyes and, although he had never before thought of her in these terms, that she was one of the most distinguished women he knew.

  “And of course another way he could make things right was to grease the wheels for your withdrawal. How much money did you walk out with?”

  “A hundred thousand.”

  “Jesus Christ.” He half-rose from the chair and looked at the floor on the other side of the bed, then at the closet door.

  “It’s in the closet. I didn’t know where else to put it. A thousand hundred-dollar bills makes a pretty big stack.”

  “I’ve never been in a room with that much money before.”

  “Mr. Bender told me I could come back tomorrow and get another hundred thousand, but I don’t think I should do that.”

  “No,” Tom said. “What did you do after you left the bank?”

  “I almost killed Roman Richard Spilka, that’s what I did. I got out of the bank, and I was walking toward my car, holding one of my bags and rolling the other one along behind me, and in pulls Mitchell’s car, with Giles driving and Roman Richard sitting beside him. All of a sudden, I felt like this horrible, reeking cloud of villainy was all around me. . . . I couldn’t see, I could barely breathe. . . . Aah!”

  Willy threw out her arms and waved them violently in front of her, as if she were trying to shake off spiderwebs or frighten away a bat. Her eyes were wild and out of focus. She kept uttering aah! in a small, stifled voice that went higher and higher. Scattered tears flew from her eyes.

  Tom jumped off the chair, stretched out on the bed beside her, and put his arms around her. At first, it was like holding a trapped animal, but after a few terrible seconds in which Tom felt his own self-control begin to waver under her assault, Willy ceased to thrash in his arms and pound her fists against his back. He stroked her head, saying her name over and over. Eventually, she sagged against him, as limp as if she were boneless. She said, “Oooooohh, just hold me for a while, okay?”

  “Try and stop me,” he said.

  Sometime later, Willy groaned and separated herself from him. “I said something about a cloud of evil, and all of a sudden it was literal, a literal cloud, all sticky and foul. . . .” She chafed her hands together, wiping off imagined gumminess.

  “It was ‘villainy,’ not ‘evil,’ ” Tom said. “A ‘reeking cloud of villainy.’ I thought that was pretty good. You know, you have a certain way with words. Ever think about becoming a writer?”

  She groaned again, this time with a touch of self-mimicry. “I never got to the part where I almost killed that fat pig, Roman Richard. So they’re in the car, and I’m close to mine, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Giles puts on his brakes, but I keep going. When I’m tossing my bags into the back seat, Giles and Roman Richard are both getting out of the car. Giles says, ‘You left home pretty early this morning, Willy.’ I say, ‘Isn’t that allowed these days?’ They’re both walking toward me, but slow, like this is just an ordinary conversation on an ordinary day. I didn’t know if Giles had gone in and seen the pictures, and if he did, he doesn’t know if I did. ‘No need to worry about me,’ I said, and I got in behind the wheel. Now they’re walking a little faster. Giles says, ‘Hold on, Willy,’ and we look at each other, and bang, he sees that I know, and I see that he sees, and now we’re not playing games anymore. Giles yells, ‘Stop her!’ to Roman Richard, and they both come running. I got my car started just in time, and I turned the wheel and jammed the pedal, and the car just shot forward. Then Roman Richard was right in front of me, and there was a kind of a soft thump, and off he flew to the side. I hit him, all right.”

  “How do you know you didn’t kill him?”

  “I don’t eve
n think I hurt him all that much. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him getting up. He sure was mad, though.”

  She pushed herself a bit farther away on the bed, picked up his right hand with both of hers, raised it to her mouth, and kissed it. She flattened the palm of his hand against her cheek. “You were wonderful to come here and tend to me. I hope you won’t mind if I tell you I love you.”

  “I was just thinking the same,” Tom said.

  Willy placed his hand on the bedspread and patted it. “Now I have to go into the bathroom and wash my face.”

  He patted her hip as she swiveled sideways to get off the bed. For a second, sexual interest raised its head, and Tom was astonished for the second it took him to imagine that, at one level below consciousness, she had just reminded him of his first lover, slight, brilliant Hiro, who had relieved him of his virginity in his sophomore year. Then he thought, No, it’s Willy, I can’t believe it, she’s turning me on. What’s happening to me?

  Sounds of running water came from the bathroom. “Really, Tom, I’m so grateful you’re here,” she called out.

  “Me, too. Willy, didn’t they follow you?”

  “I got away too fast. The bank is only half a block from the expressway, and by the time they got themselves organized, I could have gone in either direction. They probably guessed that I came to New York, but I don’t see how they could know where I am.” She appeared in the bathroom doorway, wiping her face with a small white towel. “I just hope I’m not getting you into any trouble.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I don’t suppose there’s any way he can find out you’re in this hotel, is there?”

  “Molly once told me that the Baltic people can find anything out, but after all, we’re talking about Mitchell, not the whole company. And he’s still in France.”

  “How did you check in here? Did you use a credit card?”

  “As far as the hotel is concerned, I’m W. Bryce. That’s the name on my AmEx card. Jim Patrick told me to do that when I applied for the card. Actually, Jim made out the application, and he told me that was the name he wanted me to use. We hardly ever took the AmEx cards out of our wallets, though. When we paid with plastic, we usually used MasterCard.”